Swirling thoughts

While still tremendously busy with The Sleep of Reason, I’ve been paying some attention to the swirling thoughts in my head about the next novel I might write.

I’m still a bit sketchy about it — where it would go, what it would do, who might populate it, who might narrate it, and that sort of thing. Nonetheless, these swiring thoughts are beginning to show patterns, leaving me to think I am onto something good (and altogether unlike The Sleep of Reason).

Some insights about it come to me that fit so perfectly or make such fine sense that I can barely scribble them down fast enough because I am so excited by them. I’m beginning to see the roughest frame of the story and the roles several characters would take. I’m still a long way from having enough material to begin writing, but I feel a certain kind of confidence that it will gel.

All of this might seem counterproductive since I have several more months of work just to complete a first draft of The Sleep of Reason (and I am certain now that I will rewrite it all with a third-person narrator, which will entail more work). Yet The Sleep of Reason is wholly imagined now. I might finesse some details here and there before I am finished, but all of the big “thinking through” of the plot and characters is in place.

Allowing my creative parts to begin contemplating a different story shouldn’t hinder my work on The Sleep of Reason. And a couple more months of not starting on a new story will allow those swirling thoughts to give me plenty of fresh and invigorating insights. So everyone wins (except for that poor protagonist of mine).